In simple English
Building artificial intelligence tools often requires jumping between many different websites and writing custom code. Kiln brings testing, prompt improvement, and agent building into one local desktop application. Your whole team can rate outputs and add data without writing a single line of code. It connects to your own API keys or runs offline with local models. The desktop app is free to use, with paid features for advanced automation and prompt optimization.
What it is
Kiln is a local-first workbench that handles the full lifecycle of artificial intelligence development from evaluation to deployment. It combines a desktop application for non-technical team members with an open-source Python library for engineers.
What it is good for
Solo builders and small teams who want to test prompts, build retrieval-augmented generation systems, and fine-tune language models without locking their data into a proprietary cloud service.
- Combines testing, prompt optimization, and agent building in one interface.
- Runs locally on your computer to keep your data under your control.
- Allows non-programmers to rate outputs and contribute test data.
- Custom licence terms apply to parts of the application rather than standard open source.
- Advanced features such as the automatic prompt optimizer require a paid subscription.
- Running local models or large evaluation sets requires significant computer memory and processing power.
manual prompt testing in chat windows and scattered python evaluation scripts
Ollama
- langchain-ai/langchain148k stars
Popular framework for building applications with language models through code.
- ggml-org/llama.cpp132k stars
A C and C++ library and command-line tool for running language models locally.
- EleutherAI/lm-evaluation-harness14k stars
Runs standard question sets against a language model and reports the scores.
- mudler/LocalAI50k stars
Serves text, vision, speech, image and video models from one self-hosted service that imitates the paid interfaces.
pip install kiln-ai